The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection


Holly Lewis - 2015
    But few thinkers have attempted to reconcile that knowledge—which is rooted in Marxism—with queer theory. The few who have, meanwhile, usually attempt to do so through issues of libidinal desire and sexual expression. In The Politics of Everybody, Holly Lewis argues powerfully that the emphasis on desire, though seemingly innocuous, is actually symptomatic of neoliberal habits of thought, and consequently, is responsible for a continued focus on the limited politics of identity. Instead, Lewis shows, we should look to the arena of body production, categorization, and exclusion; only through such a reorientation can we create a politics of liberation that is truly inclusive and grounded in lived experience.

The Black Panthers Speak


Philip S. Foner - 1970
    With cartoons, flyers, and articles by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, this collection endures as an essential part of civil-rights history.

The God that Failed


Richard Crossman - 1949
    In describing their own experiences, the authors illustrate the fate of leftism around the world. Andr' Gide (France), Richard Wright (the United States), Ignazio Silone (Italy), Stephen Spender (England), Arthur Koestler (Germany), and Louis Fischer, an American foreign correspondent, all tell how their search for the betterment of humanity led them to communism, and the personal agony and revulsion which then caused them to reject it. David Engerman's new foreword to this central work of our time recounts the tumultuous events of the era, providing essential background. It also describes the book's origins and impact, the influence of communism in American intellectual life, and how the events described in The God That Failed continue to affect public discourse today.

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights


Molly Smith - 2018
    You often hear, "There should be a law against it!" Or, perhaps just against the buyers. What do sex workers want? That's not something you hear asked very often. In this accessible manifesto, the strong argument for full decriminalization of sex work is explored through personal experience and looking at laws around the world.In some places, like New York, selling sex is illegal. In others, like Sweden, only buying it is. In some, like the UK and France, it's legal to sell sex and to buy it, but not to run a brothel or solicit a sale. In New Zealand, it's not illegal at all. In What Do Sex Workers Want?, Juno Mac and Molly Smith - both sex workers - explain what each of these laws do in practice to those doing the work. Addressing each model in turn, they show that prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to.

Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order


Paul A. Baran - 1966
    This landmark text by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy is a classic of twentieth-century radical thought, a hugely influential book that continues to shape our understanding of modern capitalism.

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy


Joseph A. Schumpeter - 1942
    When it first appeared the New English Weekly predicted that 'for the next five to ten years it will cetainly remain a work with which no one who professes any degree of information on sociology or economics can afford to be unacquainted.' Fifty years on, this prediction seems a little understated.Why has the work endured so well? Schumpeter's contention that the seeds of capitalism's decline were internal, and his equal and opposite hostility to centralist socialism have perplexed, engaged and infuriated readers since the book's publication. By refusing to become an advocate for either position Schumpeter was able both to make his own great and original contribution and to clear the way for a more balanced consideration of the most important social movements of his and our time.

The Revolution of Everyday Life


Raoul Vaneigem - 1967
    Published in early 1968, it both kindled and colored the May 1968 upheavals in France, which captured the attention of the world. Naming and defining the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than living in full, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and the replacement of God by the economy, the book argues that the countervailing impulses that exist within deep alienation - creativity, spontaneity, poetry present an authentic alternative to nilhilistic consumerism. This carefully edited new translation marks the first North American publication of this important work and includes a new preface by the author.

The Communist Horizon


Jodi Dean - 2012
    Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party.An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizon offers nothing less than a manifesto for a new collective politics.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media


Edward S. Herman - 1988
    Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction


Immanuel Wallerstein - 2004
    Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another—such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason


Chapo Trap House - 2018
    These self-described “assholes from the internet” offer a fully ironic ideology for all who feel politically hopeless and prefer broadsides and tirades to reasoned debate. Learn the “secret” history of the world, politics, media, and everything in-between that THEY don’t want you to know and chart a course from our wretched present to a utopian future where one can post in the morning, game in the afternoon, and podcast after dinner without ever becoming a poster, gamer, or podcaster. The Chapo Guide to Revolution features illustrated taxonomies of contemporary liberal and conservative characters, biographies of important thought leaders, “never before seen” drafts of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom manga, and the ten new laws that govern Chapo Year Zero (everyone gets a dog, billionaires are turned into Soylent, and logic is outlawed). If you’re a fan of sacred cows, prisoners being taken, and holds being barred, then this book is NOT for you. However, if you feel disenfranchised from the political and cultural nightmare we’re in, then Chapo, let’s go...

Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails


Yanis Varoufakis - 2013
    Now, he faces his most important—and difficult—audience yet. Using clear language and vivid examples, Varoufakis offers a series of letters to his young daughter about the economy: how it operates, where it came from, how it benefits some while impoverishing others. Taking bankers and politicians to task, he explains the historical origins of inequality among and within nations, questions the pervasive notion that everything has its price, and shows why economic instability is a chronic risk. Finally, he discusses the inability of market-driven policies to address the rapidly declining health of the planet his daughter’s generation stands to inherit.Throughout, Varoufakis wears his expertise lightly. He writes as a parent whose aim is to instruct his daughter on the fundamental questions of our age—and through that knowledge, to equip her against the failures and obfuscations of our current system and point the way toward a more democratic alternative.

The Death of the Liberal Class


Chris Hedges - 2010
    It gives moral legitimacy to the state. It makes limited forms of dissent and incremental change possible. The liberal class posits itself as the conscience of the nation. It permits us, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define ourselves as a good and noble people. Most importantly, on behalf of the power elite the liberal class serves as bulwarks against radical movements by offering a safety valve for popular frustrations and discontentment by discrediting those who talk of profound structural change. Once this class loses its social and political role then the delicate fabric of a democracy breaks down and the liberal class, along with the values it espouses, becomes an object of ridicule and hatred. The door that has been opened to proto-fascists has been opened by a bankrupt liberalism The Death of the Liberal Class examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues there are five pillars of the liberal establishment – the press, liberal religious institutions, labor unions, universities and the Democratic Party— and that each of these institutions, more concerned with status and privilege than justice and progress, sold out the constituents they represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.

Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump


Asad Haider - 2018
    The recent experience of the Democratic primaries and the re-emergence of social movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter has generated a new context for identity politics to become an active force, and new ground to relitigate the frustrating debates between the partisans of "race" and "class" ad infinitum. In Mistaken Identity, Asad Haider reaches for a different approach - one rooted in the rich legacies of the black freedom struggle. Drawing from the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists, he argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements, a retreat from the crucial passage from identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. Mistaken Identity is an urgent call for alternative visions, languages, and practices against the white identity politics of right-wing populism. Responding with a contrary, pluralist identity politics has proven successful. The idea of universal emancipation now seems old-fashioned and outmoded. But if we are attentive to the lines of struggle which lie outside the boundaries of the state, we will see that it has been placed on the agenda once again.

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets


Michael J. Sandel - 2012
    Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets?In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?